Description
Kindall Fredricks’ debut collection, I’ll Take My Body To-Go, begins by following a rattling hive of girls who came of age in the early 2000s. This is a book about girls who burn at the belly like a shot tin can. Girls who feel freshly peeled, ugly, and certain they’ve been cheated of something, they’re just not sure of what yet. Girls who wing their eyeliner as fiercely as an oath. Girls who can “find the nape of anything” and dig their name into the bark of their world by being as loud and as defiant as possible.
With brazen reverence, Fredricks does not shy from illuminating the trauma of their lived experiences, which are a rejection of the wax-paper world of girlhood that is so often portrayed—together, they flick the ashes of amen to the dirt, shoplift cheap wine from gas stations, and hunt for any escape from the everyday violence girls are expected to endure. I’ll Take My Body To-Go is about girls who listened, women who are listening still.
About the author
Kindall Fredricks is a practicing registered nurse and poet who received her MFA from Sam Houston State University. Her work has appeared in Passages North, Boulevard, New Letters, Grist, North American Review, and more. She lives with her daughter, husband, and collective of furballs just outside Houston, Texas.
Praise for I’ll Take My Body To-Go
Kindall Fredricks’ debut collection, I’ll Take My Body To-Go, weaves the mundane with the mythic, the profane with the prophetic, and pop culture with personal memory. The result is a potent neoconfessional series of arguments, narratives, and images that refuse the normalization of heterosexist, masculine violence the permeates US American culture. In my favorite of these poems, the language is itself denormalized or defamiliarized: “So what if I have nothing to say / about the vocabulary of flowers—those pinheaded / gossips sunning their perms mid workday with / bees sticking out of their pistils like earbuds.” Or the poems in which the speaker fiercely forges a new-found irreverent reverence for her own body and agency, like “Poem In Which I Decide To Be OK” or in the line that celebrates “too-muchness.” From apostrophes to rapists, God, lost friends, and Fiona the Hippo, to dialogic and one-line poems, Fredricks is raw, reckless, and required reading. Take this book to-go!
—Virginia Bell, author of Lifting Child from the Ground, Turning Around (Glass Lyre Press, 2025)
With the wit of Fleabag and the profound rage of teenage girlhood, Fredricks’s poems are visceral, beguiling, and entirely unpredictable. They will leave you breathless at every turn.
—Olivia Gatwood, author of Life of the Party
The poems in I’ll Take My Body To-Go are by turns celebratory and rueful, funny and brutal, personal and political, and as Fredricks sweeps us along on a journey from the treacherous wilds of girlhood to the pain-sharpened wisdom of adulthood, you’ll be struck—as I was—by the sheer verbal incandescence of her writing. At every turn, these poems spark with an unparalleled ingenuity and intensity, an adeptness with metaphor that is nothing short of genius.
—Nick Lantz
Kindall Fredericks’s debut poetry collection I’ll Take My Body to Go “is the body untroubling itself,” shaking off the boundaries of history and language. Fredericks’s originality floored me: her innovative and surprising image-play (bats as “dropped wallets” and lines like “how did I not notice/how grassy I was”), her dedication to craft, and the sheer burning aliveness of every single poem. These are brushfire poems that stun and full-barrel scream through the violent landscape of American rural girlhood (“it’s about how I was once a girl”) into the complex reality of mothering a daughter in this world that will not stop collapsing into pain. Simultaneously relatable and strange, this book will change how you think about the body and language.
—Sara Moore Wagner, author of Lady Wing Shot
